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Joined-up research will star in Wellcome’s new project

By Kat Austen

(Image&colon; Wilkinson Eyre Architects)

Seven years after it opened, and many millions of pounds later, the Wellcome Trust has put a new plank in its ambitious Wellcome Collection building in central London – with a new development that includes space for a controversial kind of research.

The trust coined the term “sciart” in 1996, and is now taking things to another level with backing for interdisciplinary research into science, humanities and the arts. A bespoke space for this research, called The Hub, will open its doors in October this year as part of a £17.5 million development of the Wellcome Collection building (see artist’s impression, above). It will host a multidisciplinary team headed by social scientist Felicity Callard from Durham University.

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City living

The first two-year project scheduled at The Hub is about busyness and rest in modern cities, and will bring together wildly different approaches from researchers from disciplines spanning neuroscience – Daniel Margulies of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Liepzig, Germany – to poetry – James Wilkes of the University of East Anglia.

City living has already been the focus of a similar endeavour – the BMW Guggenheim’s travelling lab project culminated in an exhibition and publication last year. But will the Wellcome Trust’s endeavours lead to any kind of true “consilience”, that unification of knowledge between the sciences and humanities envisioned by E. O. Wilson in his book of the same name?

The room was intended to bring together artists and scientists to share their knowledge on specific topics, but it disappeared with barely a trace after two years of struggling to survive on a shoestring budget, while Snow’s discourse has lived on, albeit often in a misappropriated form.

Pop-up lab

The Hub stands a better chance than many interdisciplinary centres because it is backed by a wealthy institution, with each two-year project endowed with £1 million.

And there is another promising angle to the renovation&colon; it includes a new attempt to reach out to the public, through a new Reading Room. This is designed as an interactive space to engage visitors with items from the Wellcome Collection, and act as a gateway to the building’s library. There will also be fun in store as the Reading Room will act as a pop-up lab for experiments run by the Hub team where the public can take part.

On the face of it, then, the Hub seems to offer a taste of something new&colon; a stable research environment in an established institution with a hefty dose of public engagement, and, at least for the first research project, an accessible theme which is well defined enough to be manageable and broad enough to be interesting.

Or so hopes Clare Matterson, director of medical humanities and engagement for the Wellcome Trust. “It provides the intellectual and physical space for scientific, artistic, historical investigations that I don’t think could be done elsewhere.”